


At the end of time

by Spylace



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Community: pacificrimkink, Gen, Hansen Family Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-03
Updated: 2013-08-03
Packaged: 2017-12-22 07:27:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/910531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does it mean to drift with a dead man when you yourself have never experienced death first hand?</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the end of time

**Author's Note:**

> Originally a fill for (http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/350.html?thread=453982#t453982) at pacificrimkink in which leda0000 asked: 
> 
> what is going through Chuck's head when he drifts with Stacker.
> 
> Which really had me asking myself, did I fill this right????

Universal compatibility is something headshrinkers in charge of the Jaeger Program try to instill in their rangers, to make it so that in the rare event a pilot outlives another, they can be paired up immediately.   
  
Because piloting a Jaeger isn’t about book smarts, good grades, or how well you do in a fight. To be honest, what they don’t tell you is that it isn’t even about genetics or shared memory. It is in essence about compatibility, shared ideals and understanding, knowing your partner, being able to read them, that elusive fraction of the human genome that constituted a soul.  
  
It was all a pile of horseshit anyway. To date, there have been only two pilots shown to have universal compatibility: the Hansens.   
  
  
Children learn a lot of things while watching their parents. He knows that his mum and dad don’t love each other but they try. They respect each other, work well together and stay for his sake but they don’t love each other, he worked that out a long time ago. Maybe if it hadn’t been for him things would have been different. If his dad hadn’t insisted on doing the honorable thing, maybe Angela Hansen might be alive.   
  
After his mom dies, Chas spends all his hours going around temporary shelters and hospitals looking for the familiar sweep of golden-blond hair. He does it from early in the morning when makeshift lobbies are bleak with the death toll until late at night when it’s no longer safe for anyone to be out and about. He skips therapy because his father isn’t there to make him and when he is, Herc doesn’t notice; too busy trying to drown his grief.   
  
Chas wonders if his dad regrets saving him. He knows he does. When the dust settles after the Kaiju attack, it’s all what-ifs on the telly. What if the people had been warned, what if the military had dropped the bomb sooner?   
  
A stranger drops by their apartment one day and raises an eyebrow at the pile of takeout and laundry shoveled in the corner. Chas stress back defiantly, a bit confused and little more afraid. As angry as he is, he fears being alone more. This is home for him, this is where he lives and no quiche-eater with his crisp uniform and his shiny boots is going to take him away from his dad.   
  
“Herc” The stranger says, “you need to take better care of your son.”   
  
His dad stares at him uncomprehendingly as though seeing him for the first time. He opens his mouth several times but nothing comes out like the shock’s stolen his voice. Setting his beer down, he tells him that he’s going to send him away.

 

 

His grandparents live in a landlocked state in the US of A. It’s a strange place, small backwards town on an endless prairie as far as the eye can see. His mother grew up on a farm, a dilapidated smokestack sitting squarely at the edge of a field. It could be a bloody castle and he wouldn’t care. He wants to go home.   
  
Chas looks around, realizes that he can no longer hear the ocean surf and that’s the first. He’s grown up beside the white caps and grey-winged gulls and it makes him even lonelier inside to see drab songbirds and their beady black eyes staring out from a berry bush. In his hand, he has a bag filled with clothing and whatever little trinkets he managed to stow away.   
  
David Smith swears when he sees him, swears when the cabbie drops him off and drives off. In stark contrast, his grandmother, his mum’s mum, is a timid woman who flutters nervously in the doorway like he might sprout fangs or is mental. She weeps at the shock of half-tousled ginger-yellow hair and tells him that he’s got his mum’s eyes, Angela’s eyes and his grandfather spits to the side with a heated curse.  
  
“’lo sir” He says, mistakenly, and his grandfather turns all of his ire towards him, his shoulders straight and back strong while most had gone stooped with age. Face stony, he demands “’s the matter with you boy. Can’t you speak properly?”   
  
Chas replies that his English is fine; it’s the Americans who had an accent anyways.   
  
His grandfather scowls and says he’s got no manners and if he doesn’t stow the attitude, he’s going to beat it out of him. Chas is in Wonderland, Neverland, a place where everyone says the wrong things even if they’re speaking English. Cowed, he walks to the scorched and vacant structure that will be his prison for the next year.  
  
Life on a farm is hard work. At least food tastes good, no more rations not that his grandfather would accept any form of government assistance. ‘Damned socialists’ he complains whenever he sees a donation meter or a food program on the telly. The man is as harsh and unforgiving as the land he learns to coax their meals from, his face weathered and worn like cowhide, brown like the sunbaked earth.   
  
It’s summertime in North America and there is no school and there won’t be any for a long time.   
  
Chas works hard from sun up to sundown and learns to answer ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ and that there are no such things as names. It’s always _boy_ followed by _useful as shithole on an elbow_.   
  
His hands blister, heal, and harden into callouses that never fails to make his grandmother cry but it doesn’t take much. She’ll tear at his peeling nose, his freckled skin and his grandfather mutters that his father was a no-account son of a bitch. He catches his fist easily, a towering six feet over his five-foot two frame.   
  
“Jesus boy” The man snorts disparagingly. “Don’t you know how to fight?”   
  
“No I don’t.” He snaps because he was taught that fighting was wrong, that he should use words instead of fists. But apparently his grandfather never got the memo because he tells his grandmother to get him his belt and takes him out back.   
  
He misses his dad at this moment, misses him so bad that it makes him sick to his stomach. Chas sees the belt, a great, leathery thing unspooling to the width of a man’s index finger and long enough to hang somebody.   
  
“You need to respect your betters.”  
  
“Maybe I’d learn if there were any.” Chas retorts because he can’t. He won’t give into this giant bully who’s driven off his only daughter and is taking his sorrow and heartache out on the only family he’s got left. Unexpectedly, his grandfather’s craggy face breaks off into a grin. But his eyes are mean and he can’t turn away.   
  
“You’ve got guts, I like that. But you need a beatin’ and that’s a fact.” He says solemnly. “Consider this your first lesson.”   
  
His grandfather dies the following spring. He gets a name out of it, ‘Chuck’ when the neighbors come to pay their respects.   
  
He joins the LA Shatterdome shortly after.

 

Chuck’s thirteen when he joins, one of the youngest. He’s half-afraid that they’ll see his name and throw him out, somehow connect him to the Australian war hero who piloted Tango Tasmania and Vulcan Specter and call him out on it. But Hansen’s a common last name and they barely bat an eye at the forms he fills out, the little signature at the bottom declaring him an emancipated minor.   
  
He’s fairly popular at first. Gets high marks, gets on the academy equivalent of honor roll and scores near perfect on every sim. Trouble begins when they look for compatibility in future pilots.   
  
Dr. Caitlin Lightcap is the creator of the Drift and yet even she cannot explain what it does, what it is, what it means. Drifting is more than the bridging of minds. It’s more like baring your soul to the other person. Within the Drift, there are no secrets, every thought; every memory is there at the edge of your eyelids.

 

Chuck is different. He never wanted to be different. All he wanted was to have his mum back, to be back home, watching telly, begging for a brand new puppy. He can tell that dad would have given in, only there was no time.

 

There is no time now except for the numbers on the war clock. Chuck Hansen learns everyone’s innermost secrets and give nothing away.   
  
In turn, they despise him.  
  
  
He and his father are reunited at his graduation. His fellow cadets mutter ‘of course’ and ‘favoritism’ behind his back. But he’s genuinely surprised when he sees Herc Hansen in a crowd in his uniform, looking sad, proud and resigned all at the same time.   
  
Beside him is Stacker Pentecost, the Marshall, the stranger who turned his life upside down. But he isn’t the little boy who left home missing his mum, desperate for his daddy to say something, anything, to yell back that he should have died in her stead. Chuck has spent the last four years growing up, learning to fight. It doesn’t matter no one wants to drift with him. He’s ready to take on the Kaiju and make sure they stay down wherever the fuck they came from.   
  
Chuck sneers a little at their approach, crossing his arms defiantly when they congratulate him for graduating at the top of his class. He knows this already. _Thanks dad_. He is told that he is a candidate for Striker Eureka.   
  
But only if he is compatible and he knows all about compatibility. It’s not like what the doctors say, genetics, acceptance, and open mind. It is a fight, one you can’t lose, maintaining balance, an invisible wall between the minds so neither is overwhelmed.   
  
Despite everything, when they drift it is a shock. He breaks down after in a bathroom stall sobbing because he can’t tell where his thoughts begin and his dad’s end. Herc Hansen doesn’t come looking for him _thank god_ but he can feel his father’s presence at the back of his mind like a missing limb, something the eggheads at mission control can’t explain.   
  
He knows that his father loves him, loved him, loves him still. And it hurts so much anyway knowing that despite that love, nothing can change. They make a great team not because they’re father and son but because in the end, they are reflections of each other.   
  
He and his father work well together because they don’t stir the pot. There are things that they will never say, things that they can only convey through mutual love for a dog or inside Striker where no matter what the shrinks write down on their neat little files, they are at peace.   
  
The Kaiju start coming faster and faster and they rack up the kills, them and Striker Eureka. There are others at the Sydney Shatterdome but none that can match them for speed or sheer power. He feels a vicarious thrill through the neural link whenever Kaiju Blue spreads across the surf. It isn’t about fame or the money or how many people want to sleep with him. His father was the best of his generation; Chuck wants to be the greatest of them all.

 

He fights in realization that it is the one thing he is good at, it is the one thing he knows how to do and he embraces it. There is no failure for him, no death. His father does not fear death; he knows that there are worse fates. He fears for Chuck because he is young and cannot see anything within him except a warrior spirit.   
  
Chuck resents his father and on some days, he hates him too. But Herc is the only family he’s got, the only thing on Earth he’s got left to claim so he promises that he won’t die. He won’t be like the others washed up and tired, the losers who faded to obscurity after their loss.   
  
So he doesn’t understand Stacker Pentecost who is a solid presence through and through, his mind brushing up against his like an afterthought, sharing all his secrets, all his memories, all his hopes and wishes and what he wants for the world and people in it. Chuck doesn’t understand a man who is ready to die without a fight.  
  
Their link is strained, held by the tenuous fact that he is his father’s son and no matter what, he will be compatible with anyone they put him with, Mako, the two fruit loops down in the labs, _Ra_ leigh and the specter of his brother tight around his neck. Hell, maybe even the Kaiju.   
  
(I’m dying Ranger, I’ve known that a long time.  
  
Sir, all due respect, that is bullshit. If you love your daughter, fight for her. Live for her.)   
  
Chuck’s heard of what everyone says about him and it’s all true. But that also means that he’s the best damned pilot there is. There is no more to life for him than this. He wants to live; he wants to apologize because for them, drifting only meant that he and his father never had to speak. But in that, they took each other for granted and never said the things that were meant to be said aloud.  
  
The Hansens are universally compatible, inscrutable to others, a loss of balance and trust that ends with only each other to understand. Compatibility is more than genetics; it is what lies in their souls, the magical percentage that is the blueprint of a human being. What he doesn’t know about his father, it’s because he didn’t care to look and because he didn’t care to share.   
  
After his mum died, he had nothing, not even his dad because he pushed him away and he is so goddamned sorry that he lied when he told his father he knew.   
  
(He’s proud of you. He loves you.)  
  
Because every parents are supposed to.  
  
Chuck is not like Mako who thinks it’s over once the monsters are dead. He’s not like Pentecost who knows he’s going to die or his father who thinks that they will never see each other again.  
  
(I’m proud of you.)  
  
“It’s been a pleasure.” He says hoarsely and Pentecost nods.   
  
Chuck fights because he believes that he will never die.

**Author's Note:**

> My ongoing efforts to move my fills for PRKM in a readable format. 
> 
> Ugh, this heat.


End file.
